VCF9 – VCF5.X to VCF9 upgrade

It looked easy on paper, but reality had a few surprises.

In his latest blog post, Daniel Krieger takes readers through a brownfield upgrade from VCF 5.x to VCF 9. The process starts with the familiar order — SDDC Manager, NSX, vCenter, ESXi, and finally vSAN — but not everything goes as smoothly as expected.

Early blockers:

• NSX compatibility – with versions newer than 4.2.1.3, you currently can’t upgrade to VCF 9.0.0.0.
• vCenter Lifecycle Manager bug – ESXi 9 images don’t show up during the upgrade. The fix involves a quick database cleanup to refresh the metadata.

Once those hurdles are cleared, the rest of the upgrade works as planned. The catch: you need to stick to the exact Bill of Materials (ESXi 9.0.0.0, Build 24755229). Patches like 9.0.0.0100 can only be applied afterwards via VCF Operations.

What makes this post particularly valuable are the step-by-step screenshots, task logs, and command snippets. Daniel shows exactly what the error messages look like, how he troubleshoots them, and the moment things finally click into place.

His takeaway: the upgrade is essentially a patch cycle, but details matter. With VCF 9.0.1 the process should get easier, but until then it pays to know your BOM, check the interoperability matrix, and expect a few bumps along the way.

👉 Read the full post here